Enough is enough. After remaining divided on this issue for too long, it is time to take a stand regardless of the political consequences.

It is time to join with those who have already had the courage to weather the inevitable criticism from a biased, bought, and paid for press corps that is part of the greater problem we face.

It is time to end the double standard that for far too long has guided and distorted America's policies in the Middle East.

You all know the story: For decades, special interest-driven ties have enabled a small lobby in Washington to embrace policies that have cost America dearly and today, increasingly put our national security and national prestige at risk. We have for too long supported Middle Eastern political leaders who themselves represent comparatively small populations with dubious historical claims on the land they control and extreme religious agendas. These so-called allies have not only implemented unfair policies that have earned criticism around the world, they have actually implemented apartheid-like segregation of the people they govern. Minority interlopers have unjustly appropriated power, held it by force, and often brutally oppressed majorities that deserve better.

While this is our policy for a subset of the Middle East, for others in the region we are much less accommodating. We are constantly haranguing them, criticizing, demanding that they achieve an ever-higher standard of behavior … even though their historical claims on the region are every bit as great as those we coddle, even though in many ways they have served America more reliably than those we prop up with our military aid, even though they are in many ways the source of the region's vitality and have the clearest vision as to how it might break out of the economic and political crises that torment it.

The cost of this double standard is painfully apparent today. Just look at the headlines. In Syria, all America can do is make earnest but impotent shows of solidarity with opposition leaders and search for new adjectives to add to our denunciations of the illegitimate Assad regime. But because of our double standard, because of the fact that we dare not call out the Arab nations we have supported for so long at such a high cost, because we can't count on them as our allies to do the right thing and add pressure on Assad to go, we are forced to treat this grave humanitarian crisis as though it were happening on the moon, far from any real ability of us to influence it.

Yes, the Syria crisis does, as is often noted, illustrate the greatest of the many follies associated with the frustrating saga of Western intervention in Libya. That is, of course, that by intervening in Libya ineffectively, we have now made it impossible for anyone to believe we will intervene anywhere else, even when, as in Syria's case, more credible threats of punishing Assad would have been helpful arrows to have in our quiver.

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The greater good is the bitch-goddess of foreign policy. It provides at once both the inspiration to elevate society and the temptation to debase it. I'm sure one of the reasons that the study of foreign policy draws in so many passive-aggressive poindexters is because they get a cheap thrill from entering a fraternity in which the only admissions requirement is checking your conscience at the door.

In the first international affairs class one attends or the first serious discussion of foreign policy in which one participates, sooner or later the focus turns to the tough choices that must be made in the name of the Shiva of Foggy Bottom.

It is easy to understand this impulse when one watches scenes as in Libya in which a corrupt despot seeks to maintain his illegitimate chokehold on a society through the slaughter of those who only seek the rights due all men and women. Using force and taking life to stop evil and to protect those who cannot defend themselves is certainly justifiable albeit fraught with moral complexities that we too often too easily set aside.

That said however, we have to acknowledge that the natural habitat of this particular bitch-goddess is the slipperiest of slopes. It is worth remembering that most of the world's greatest sins have been committed in the service of someone's definition of the greater good. It is a point the Obama administration ought to take to heart as recent headlines suggest that we are crossing to the wrong side of the world's most dangerous border, the one that divides "realism" from "evil."

Not surprisingly, no place illustrates this danger like the region we call AfPak. And as a consequence no place more emphatically shouts out the question: "Have we no decency? Are there no limits to what we are willing to accept in the pursuit of our allegedly high-minded goals?"

We accept Hamid Karzai and elements of the Pakistani government although we know them to be corrupt and very likely supporting or enabling our enemies. We do this despite the lesson being chanted in public squares across the Middle East -- not to mention most of the history of modern U.S. foreign policy -- is that this approach inevitably comes back to bite us in the most sensitive parts of our national interests. We are seen as the co-authors of the wrongs our chosen despots commit or tolerate because ... well, because we are. That we are doing this in Afghanistan even as we are seemingly preparing to embrace a bigger role for the Taliban in the government only compounds the wrong -- the only justification for supporting Karzai is that he is better than the alternative but we don't seem to think that's necessarily the case anymore. Whatever your view of the issue, you have to admit it's a treacherously morally ambiguous place to venture to reclaim the national standing the Obama team correctly feels the United States lost during the Bush years.

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When I read the Washington Post's story "Palestinians Seek Recognition through South America" this morning, all I could think of was Sarah Palin. Now, some might think that is a kind of a disorder that calls for therapy more than it does another blog post. But I suspect you are probably jumping to the wrong conclusion about what I think about either issue.

In defense of my mental health (which needs all the defending it can get), one reason I thought of Palin was that as I was reading the article, she appeared on the television. She was being asked what she thought about birther claims that President Obama was not born in the United States. Without the hesitation or weasel words that have made recent statements on this subject by Michele Bachmann and John Boehner such indictments of their ability to lead, Palin said that it wasn't an issue for her and that we ought to be talking about how to fix the economy. In this instance, she got it precisely right.

But the Palin comment and the birther debate also resonated with the story of the eight Latin American governments that in December and January recognized Palestinian statehood. representatives of the Netanyahu government including the prime minister himself apparently vigorously tried to persuade the region's leaders not to join the almost 100 nations that have also acknowledged the legitimacy of the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people.

Once again, the issue seems like a distraction to me. The response of Israel ought to be like the response of Palin, "Of course, the Palestinian people have a right to a state." In fact, it's only a bit of an over-simplification to say, the right response ought to be literally what Palin's was: That it's not an issue for them and we ought to be talking about how to fix the economy -- that is we ought to be focused on how you go from the indisputable right of the Palestinians to have their own state to working together to create one that is self-sustaining and can do a better job creating opportunities for the Palestinian people than neighboring states (other than Israel) have done for their citizens. That's the critical challenge for both Israelis and Palestinians together.

That of course, also requires that the Palestinian leadership actually get serious about both negotiating a deal and providing fundamental services to the Palestinian people. An honest debate about this subject, stripped of the distractions upon which both sides have depended on as cover for so long, would turn more to such practical issues.

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President Hosni Mubarak's speech to the Egyptian people in the wake of days of rioting was a masterpiece of insensitivity. With his citizens in the street expressing their needs, he addressed his own. He spoke of poverty and concern for his people, but his message was something far darker. He was making a stand for the status quo.

Watching him, ghostly in the stark podium lighting designed to hide what hints of his age his hairdresser and doctors could not, it was clear that this was an old man comfortable in the old ways of the Middle East. As such he was as much a remnant of Egypt's past leadership as any mummy in the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities in Cairo, just as brittle, frail, and ready to turn to dust.

His sacrifice of his cabinet also evoked ancient practices, as well as the last ditch measures of autocrats throughout history. His ministers -- many of whom were not objects of the people's anger -- were used as cannon fodder, a way to test whether the old president's position would hold. The hours and days ahead will determine whether it was enough: whether there are real reforms he might actually entrust his new government with or whether he is betting that his lifelong ties to the military will protect him in ways that his political savvy no longer can.

He is a man out of touch with his people and his times. Like Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, he is a symptom of the greatest problem the region has faced over the past several decades: its self-absorbed, corrupt leadership. From Algiers to Kabul, an arc of autocracy extends across nearly all of the greater Middle East, denying citizens the right of self-determination, buying international favor with oil or political deals, ignoring educational needs, the rights of women, and the investments needed to compete in the global economy.

But with each starkly out-of-touch pronouncement like that from Mubarak today, the arc trembles a bit. Certainly, the fall of Ben Ali started it quivering. In Yemen and in Jordan, demonstrators tested the waters to see if progress might be made there. We have already seen the potency of the Green Revolution in Iran and recognize that even when the autocrats seem to win the day, they only postpone the inevitable. You can't keep the cell phones and the Internet and Twitter accounts off indefinitely and compete in the modern world. You can't deny a future to populations dominated by the young and expect enduring stability.

In Israel, leaders are deeply ambivalent, fearful of instability in a country that has been vitally important to the region's stability -- and even more fearful that what they perceive as an even weaker, minority regime in Jordan might totter. At the same time, on some level they cannot help but note that not only do these uprisings underscore their nearly unique role as a democracy in the region (we will see what reform in Iraq brings) but even more importantly, they illustrate clearly that Israel is far from the biggest problem the region faces.

It is tempting for "realists" everywhere to cling to stability over the questions that opening these countries to self-determination might raise. But we should all have long since passed that point of hesitation. Either we are for the principle or we are not. Either all people deserve these freedoms or they do not. Someday historians may draw a direct connection between President Barack Obama's call for reforms and a new relationship between the United States and the people of the Islamic world in his Cairo speech and the events of this winter. We can only hope that it is connection marked by U.S. actions that are consistent with the high ideals espoused by the president.

In the words of Secretary Clinton today, we have hope that will be the case. In the "Made in the U.S.A." marking on the tear gas canisters being used against the Egyptian protestors we see the potential ugliness that can come from that old-fashioned form of flawed pragmatism that is a hallmark of US foreign policy -- the form in which we make a deal for today's stability that puts us on the wrong side of tomorrow's revolution.

I am beginning to think that John Edwards, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Octomom, and Jon Gosselin have joined together to form their own public relations firm ... and that their first client is the Vatican. I have come to this conclusion because it is impossible for me to imagine any other group of people giving the Holy See the kind of P.R. advice they seem to be getting.

The evidence came in yesterday's extraordinary statement from the Vatican "defending" themselves against attacks that they have not done enough to combat sexual abuse by priests. Rather than contritely focusing on all they have done to address this cancer on their credibility, they offered a response that will be studied in schools for years to come, whether in classes seeking to offer a lesson in how not to handle a crisis or in those offering an advanced degree in miscalculated chutzpah.

Following a meeting with the U.N. Human Rights Council meant to address concerns that the Church was failing to respond appropriately to a long history of members of the clergy abusing their flocks, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi read a statement that was undoubtedly considered by some spin doctor-equivalent somewhere to advance their case but which actually probably amounted to more convincing proof that the Vatican doesn't get it on this issue than anything discussed behind closed doors with the United Nations.

• They argued that "available research" showed that only 1.5 to 5 percent of the clergy engaged in child sex abuse. Which is to say that they seemed to think that possibly having one out of every 20 priests taking advantage of the children in their parishes was not really such a big number. After all, it's only 6,000 to 20,000 priests worldwide.

• Tomasi then went on to quote statistics suggesting that in the U.S. protestant churches actually had a much worse child sex abuse problem and that sexual abuse was also common in Jewish communities. "They're doing it too," was never a very good defense when I was in elementary school and in this case, it seems a particularly ill-considered line of argument. Compounding the mistake, he also argued that family members, neighbors and babysitters were far more likely to molest children than priests. While all this may be true, it does not exactly sound like they were focused on accepting responsibility for actions within their own organization. Not being a Catholic, I'm not sure of the procedures, but I'm pretty sure that the proper drill at confession is "forgive me Father for I have sinned" and not "well, yes, Father I may have sinned, but I wasn't the only one."

• As reported in the Guardian, the statement then took what was probably its most bizarre turn:

The statement said that rather than paedophilia, it would "be more correct" to speak of ephebophilia, a homosexual attraction to adolescent males.

Of all priests involved in the abuses, 80 to 90% belong to this sexual orientation minority which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the ages of 11 and 17."

Aha. Well, I don't know about you, but now I feel much better about things. Most of the 6,000-20,000 priests who are abusing children at a rate somewhat lower than that of other religious groups are doing it with somewhat older kids. That puts things in a whole different light! I'm sure the whole ephebophilia defense will have altar boy enrollments skyrocketing in no time at all.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Vatican's response neither satisfied the man accusing it of covering up sex abuse within the Church nor did it sit very well with representatives of other religions. Keith Porteous Wood, of the NGO that charged the Catholic Church with violating several provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, said not enough had been done by the Church to address its internal problems or to open its records to permit civil prosecution of wrong-doers.

Protestant and Jewish representatives were quick to respond condemning the Church's attempt to spread around the blame and defending their own approaches to the problem.

Had these other religious groups asked my advice, I might have told them to simply remain silent and let the Archbishop Tomasi have the limelight and the microphone all to himself. It is hard to imagine what the Church could possibly do to look worse than it already did in the face of a global scandal that has cost it $2 billion in settlements in the United States alone. Hard to imagine ... and yet somehow, that's precisely what it did. 

CHRISTOPHE SIMON/AFP/Getty Images

Millions of you turn to this blog site every day because you feel I will offer you insights that will help you make sense of the world. I know this. It's a humbling responsibility. And frankly, the enormity of it forces me to offer a confession. Today I reviewed the morning papers as I usually do (online, sans paper) and watched the early broadcasts of TV news organizations and I have got to admit it, I find everything pretty confusing. 

For instance:

• The Michael Jackson memorial service will cost the City of Los Angeles $4 million. That's their official estimate. I would bet you my copy of the "Thriller" album that the costs are considerably higher and they can't bear to admit it. Why? Well, because California is broke, right? So here we have a government that is strapped for cash forking out for the public funeral of a multi-millionaire...an event that is likely to sell hundreds of thousands of records the profits of which go straight to Jackson's family.

• On top of this, isn't this the same local government that spent hundreds of thousands trying to prosecute today's hero for child molestation? Whose case was made more difficult because today's hero paid millions to buy the silence of children with whom he had some sort of interaction...one that was worth millions to keep covered up?

• Also baffling: in a bizarre twist on a bizarre case, in order to defray the costs of memorial, the NAACP is, according to MSNBC, trying to raise funds from their members and supporters. Am I getting this right? The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is pulling out the stops to raise money for an individual who actually spent a small fortune testing the boundaries of medical science in order to actually cease being a person of color?

• And, back to California being broke, yesterday its credit rating dropped to two notches above junk status. This is an economy that were it that of a country would rank 8th in the world. This is a failing government that controls an economy larger than that of Russia, India, or Brazil. (Not to mention, Canada, Mexico or Italy.) And yet here in Washington, I get no sense of urgency on this. We do company bailouts. What's our policy going to be on state and city bailouts?

• Meanwhile, while the media's attention is focused on the Staple Center in Los Angeles, the President of the United States is meeting with the prime minister of the world's only other nuclear superpower. This story is less important than the media canonization of the guy who actually invented the concept of celebutard (someone famous primarily for doing really stupid things) and whose greatest accomplishments consisted of making high-pitched noises come out of his food hole. Want to get a sense of what it must have been like to be in the room with Vladimir and Barack? Take a look at the video of them settling in before the cameras for their joint statement this morning. Yikes. Calling all body language experts. There was none of that George W. Bush staring deep into each other's eyes you can rest assured about that.

• At the same time, roughly the same number of protestors was likely killed in Western China as in Iran a couple weeks ago, and the global outrage-o-meter is barely stirring. Apparently Muslims killing Muslims is worse than Muslims and Han Chinese killing each other which proves what? The media believes in the multiplicative power of Muslims in weighing the value of a story? Or could it be that China is too big and important to too many people to be called out on its abuses? When will we realize that we can't actually have a strong relationship with a country and a spineless one at the same time? For the United States, for example, our shared interests with China and the strengths of the relationship need to be strong enough to endure the airing of our differences or they are meaningless and the relationship will ultimately be doomed by the tensions that are not aired.

• Meanwhile, sitting in his gilded Vatican palace, the Pope has issued an encyclical striking out against greed. The encyclical, while assailing the ethical lapses that caused the current global economic meltdown, makes no mention of hypocrisy however. This might be seen as a lapse given the Church's financial record over the years, including but not limited to the failure of Banco Ambrosiano, a bank it owned. (Although one has to wonder if they had access to a higher power that guided the Vatican treasury away from investing in derivatives, which they reportedly eschewed.) Interestingly, the encyclical also warned against the perils of mismanaged globalization...an interesting switch since arguably the Catholic Church was the world's most important early force for globalization, a fact which largely triggered the reformation. (Well, the globalization thing and the financial excesses and ethical abuses of senior church officials.) And, confusingly enough, noting all these ironies and twists, the message of the Pope's encyclical about better ethics and distribution of wealth seemed timely and useful.

• Similarly confusing to me was the fact that in the wake of the United Nations latest impotent, paper condemnation of North Korean missile tests that one could not hear a wave of laughter rippling around the world. But then again, perhaps everyone was too busy figuring out which of the 16 television networks that were scheduled to be carrying the Jackson memorial they would be watching. Fortunately for us all, the Security Council, according to an AP report quoting its current president Ugandan Ambassador Ruhakana Rugunda, "will continue to closely monitor the situation and is committed to a peaceful, diplomatic and political solution." What a relief. 

• Finally, while all the above surprises me, one last thing that I find a bit bewildering is the number of things that are utterly unsurprising that pass for news. Just to take a couple of utterly predictable examples from today's Washington Post, "Post-Bankruptcy GM Will Have Work Cut Out for It," "Pottermania Grips London for World Premiere" and any story that discusses the arrest of former DC Mayor Marion Barry.

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If you are looking for a unifying theme to describe the overarching policies of the Obama administration, you will find it coming from the least likely source: Hillary Clinton's State Department. I don't say the source is unlikely because HRC is doing a bad job. She's actually done very well. It's just an unlikely source because for reasons that have to be more than an accident, the department itself seems to have become the equivalent of Dick Cheney's undisclosed location. It, and particularly the Secretary, is off the radar. Everyone in DC these days is talking about how she hasn't appeared on a morning show. The Hill had a piece the other day on "The Incredible Shrinking Clintons." Richard Holbrooke has a much higher profile than his boss. Certainly, Bob Gates has had a higher profile and even the nearly invisible Jim Jones has gotten more press recently if only because of the leaked articles about some of his early (and I believe overstated) missteps.

Anyway, the theme and the metaphor that ties so much of what has been going on is "hitting the reset button," made famous when just such a button was delivered, mislabeled, by the state department to the Russians who were the first focus of what has become reset-mania. In addition to attempting to restart that relationship with our former arch-enemies, you can see evidence of the same mentality everywhere. We are attempting to hit the reset button for GM and Chrysler by pushing them through the bankruptcy process (the same one we spent tens of billions to avoid months earlier). 

Today President Obama heads to the Middle East to hit the reset button on our relations with the Muslim World. Problems in Iraq and AfPak? Hit reset. Frayed alliances? Reset. Economy in the tank, Wall Street a mess? To many observers the impulse has been less toward sweeping reform and more toward getting things back to the way they were (with modest changes). In other words: reset. Demonstrating that no issue is too marginal or too antiquated for the focus on resetting, you need look only 90 miles away to Cuba. We even seem to be approaching health care by trying to hit the reset button to take the debate back to the days before the Clinton health care plan cratered and set health care reform back for more than 15 years. 

Of course, the impulse to hit the reset button is pretty natural given the toxic nature of many Bush-era policies. And the reset button metaphor works for all of us in the information age and is undoubtedly better than suggesting that we cleanse ourselves of all the Bush dirt and toxins by climbing into the shower together.

But as any computer user knows, hitting reset doesn't work all the time. It's kind of magical when it does...to the extent that it seems inexplicable to most of us. But it would be a big mistake to make too much policy based on the notion that President Obama has -- to mix metaphors slightly -- the equivalent of the Fonzie touch, the ability to make a jukebox (or Bushed-up policy or relationship) work with a slap to its side. (I don't think it's mixing metaphors that much. The Fonzie touch is the '50s equivalent of the reset button.)

But here's the problem: if your computer is broken, the motherboard is fried, the demon viruses are at work on your data -- the reset button doesn't work. Same is true with broken companies, broken relationships, and broken global economies. Sometimes you may get signs that things are spluttering back to life but without real, material changes the problems will re-emerge. Sometimes you will get nothing at all.

In this respect, going to the Middle East to "restore relations with the Muslim world" sounds great in the reset context...Obama certainly achieves the main goal (and to some extent the primary deliverable) of Resetism, he demonstrates he is not George W. Bush. But it is unlikely to do much to actually fix the problem. It may help, to be sure. But many of the biggest problems that we have with regard to the Muslim world aren't actually problems we created or exacerbated. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Egypt, the President's two regional destinations, are anything like democracies...or for that matter are they home to anything like enlightened governments. Economic mismanagement and corruption are chronic and widespread and a bigger source of regional instability than many other issues that achieve more prominence. They are home to human rights violations, abominable treatment of women and tolerance of radical factions who are as big a threat to the Arab world as they are to the U.S. or any of our allies. These places are breeding grounds for risk to our interests and even doing the right thing and underscoring that the U.S. embraces Islam and all peace-loving Muslims, doesn't get down to the hard business of resolving tensions between the Arab and Persian worlds, the Sunnis and the Shiites, radicals and moderates, reformers and authoritarian rules or Arabs and Israelis. 

Further, we need to remind ourselves that we are not the primary cause of the problems we face. We may have exacerbated some. There is no defense for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, or for the hundreds of thousands of innocents who died thanks to our invasion of Iraq. But neither is there any defense for 9/11, terrorism directed at anyone, or state-supported hate mongering. Our support for Israel may inflame the Arab world but even when we acknowledge Israeli policy failures or brutality, even when we condemn them and work against them, we are only addressing part of the problem. 

As a consequence as President Obama wings off to the region, it heightens my sense that there is as at least as much reason for the leaders of the Muslim world to come to America to restore relations with us, to make amends and commit to change, as there is for the President to go there and do so. Indeed, there is much more given the level of dysfunctionality within their societies and their long record of miserable treatment of their own people.

Similarly, the reset button won't fix GM or Chrysler. Admittedly, doing what we should have done six months ago, letting the companies go into bankruptcy and be stripped down to more efficient pieces will help. But U.S. ownership certainly will not (and has not...save for all that writing of big checks.) Merging with Fiat probably won't either. I think the odds are pretty high that we will look at the U.S. monies spent on the auto industry as the most expensive golden parachute in history, designed to make the demise of failed companies as painless as possible and not really terrible effective at identifying, preserving or fostering value within either of them. There is a reset hope in all this -- strip 'em down and let them regrow like a backyard shrub-but without creativity and truly new thinking, neither of which will come from the government or the labor unions who have gained too much sway in all this given their roles in creating the problem, these efforts will likely be frustratingly costly and unsuccessful. 

The list goes on. If there were core problems associated with the creation of new invisible unregulated risks in the global financial systems, even restoring growth to markets and the U.S. economy is not a fix. The risks will remain until addressed. To restore US-Russia relations really requires a fix in Russia and not here. To restore U.S.-Cuba relations to their rightful place in our foreign policy, we need to transfer it to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State responsible for the Caribbean, normalize, and start treating like we should in much the same way we handle Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago. In short, to achieve the ambitious goals the Obama administration has set and the American people seek, we need to rethink, reinvent and remember where the real problems lie...and not just hope that the world is as easily rebooted as our PCs. 

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

David Broder today writes of Barack Obama's coming into his own as commander in chief. Obama has been helped immeasurably in this respect by his simultaneous emergence as the country's lawyer in chief. Never have those skills been so well displayed as during today's speech delivered at the National Archives in defense of his decision to close Guantanamo. 

Obama's arguments today were methodical, rigorous, substantiated by facts and guided both by logic and principle. They stand in stark contrast to those of the one man who doesn't seem to realize the Bush administration is over, the modern equivalent of one of those Japanese soldiers wandering an atol in the Pacific long after the end of World War II, continuing to fight for ideas and goals that have long since been discredited and defeated. That would be, of course, Dick Cheney, who at best is merely shrill, bitter, and hysterical and at worst is the unrepentant architect of policies and programs that willfully violated and offended the spirit of the constitution of the United States. (More on this last point shortly.)

Obama may be the best lawyer to occupy the U.S. presidency since William Howard Taft went from the White House to being Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In fact, he is likely better than the affable and ginormous Taft and, who knows, may someday follow in the (deep) footsteps of the man who was also famous for having gotten stuck in the nation's First Bathtub. Standing in front of the documents that serve as the legal and moral foundations of American society, Obama offered a plain-spoken but powerful argument: Rather than "strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And during this season of fear too many of us -- Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens -- fell silent. In other words, we went off course."

He effectively made his case that due process and a respect for our system of law would do more to protect us than would the Bush approach which might be characterized, to paraphrase Clare Boothe Luce, as cutting the constitution to suit the fashions of the times. Laying out category after category of detainee and explaining how they should be treated consistent with both our national interests and the prevailing views of the U.S. judiciary, he described an approach so logical and consistent with American concepts of fairness, that it not only makes the fringe-dwelling Cheney sound out of touch, it makes the entire U.S. Senate (or the 90 who voted yesterday against appropriating funds to shut down Guantanamo) seem to be petty, political panderers. How ludicrous they seem fearing to locate terrorists from Guantanamo alongside the hundreds of terrorists already in America's network of impregnable Supermax and similar facilities. How responsible and constructive comments from Dianne Feinstein and Lindsay Graham have therefore been in noting the absurdity of the self-interested NIMBYism of their colleagues.

Cheney, who offered a set of counter-point remarks, was legally, morally, and intellectually out-gunned by the president. Nowhere was this clearer than in the description of his speech by an aide in which he described it as arguing ""our values are not abrogated by prioritizing security for innocents over rights for terrorists." It is a powerful statement that captures everything that is wrong with their view. It is precisely the idea that we can suspend the rights of suspected wrong-doers in order to "protect" the rest of society that undercuts our entire system of law. That system specifically enshrines rights for the worst of criminals to ensure that it is not fear nor political sentiment nor the view of any individual or even the majority that drives the legal process but that instead all of us are equal under the law.

Or as Cheney said during his speech, "There is never a good time to compromise when the lives and safety of the American people are in the balance." Exactly. It is precisely at such moments that our convictions and values are tested and we reveal the character of our leadership and our country.

Which gets us to the one thing that Obama asserted today that I questioned while hearing his remarks...in part because the rest of his statement was so compelling. He remarked that he did not want to dwell on rearguing the debates of the Bush years but would rather move forward to focus on the challenges of today. Fair enough. But, I wonder if he does not misread the historical significance of the missteps of the Bush era, particularly those associated with Guantanamo, torture, and Abu Ghraib. More than the bungling in Iraq, more even than the lies associated with getting into that war, it was these moral failures that damaged the United States and the Bush administration, did more damage by far than any the terrorists could inflict. In fact, what we did played directly into the plans of the terrorists themselves, casting us in a light that served their objectives. 

Which is why I am starting to think that this is not like Watergate, a domestic political wound Gerald Ford was right to cauterize with his pardon. Domestic and international laws were broken by the last administration beginning with president and vice president's deliberate decision not to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States. I am not for prosecuting lawyers who interpreted the law to meet the requirements of their bosses. But I do think that leaders in any nation need to be held accountable for any crimes they may have committed or ordered. If the United States does not choose to identify and prosecute even those in high positions who violate the law we set a dangerous precedent...regardless of whether or not the incidents in question are so distasteful we want to move past them.

Further, if we don't, I feel it's a pretty fair bet that sometime soon a prosecutor beyond our borders will seek to prosecute Bush or Cheney for what they did. (Compare their actions to others whose prosecutions we have supported...in terms of values, casualties, costs, laws broken.) It may not be an outcome Obama seeks...but it may be the one called for by the values and laws he so eloquently defended today.

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